We’re Not All Neurodivergent. So Why Does It Suddenly Look That Way?

Did you see my last blog article on the numbers and come away thinking I was saying that everyone is neurodivergent in some small way?

Nope, that’s not it.

Original Piece -> https://m31.global/beyond-diagnosis-what-if-weve-been-counting-the-wrong-people/

There was a much more subtle point sitting underneath that model, where the data suggests that something like 40 to 50 percent of the population may be neuro-complex. That doesn’t mean everybody is neurodivergent, it doesn’t mean 40 to 50 percent of people are disabled, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re “all a little bit autistic” or ADHD or anything else. There are neurotypical people, there are neurodivergent people, and within both of those enormous groups there is a spectacular amount of human variation.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m using neuro-complexity as an umbrella term covering things including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and many of the other ways human brains develop and operate differently. There is overlap between them, they don’t all present in the same way, and importantly, diagnosis is not the thing that makes somebody neuro-complex. Diagnosis is simply one of the ways we eventually notice.

There is another slightly strange thing happening around the edges of all this too, which is worth acknowledging without confusing it with the model itself. As neurodivergence becomes more visible culturally, people learn language, behaviours and ways of understanding themselves from other people. Families share genetics, but families also share behaviours. Communities develop their own social norms. People mirror one another, mask around one another and learn from one another. Add social media, pop culture and increasingly visible neurodivergent subcultures, and it becomes quite difficult to untangle what is neurological, what is behavioural expression, what has always been there but finally has a name, and what has been socially learned. That’s a fascinating rabbit hole, but it isn’t something I have tried to count in the model.

One question keeps popping into my head whenever I talk about all of this, and it was part of what sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place.

If there really are far more neuro-complex people than we’ve recognised, why does it feel like we’re only noticing now?

It’s not because human beings have suddenly changed.

The world around us has.

For the last few hundred years, much of society has been shaped around the industrial era. Schools, workplaces and institutions were increasingly designed to produce consistency, reliability and predictability. We needed people who could follow processes, repeat tasks, arrive at a particular time, work a set number of hours, and keep an incredibly successful industrial machine moving.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that. It was enormously successful and gave us much of the modern world.

The problem is that we did it for so long that we started confusing the systems we created for that world with human nature itself.

Eight hours became a working day. Five days became a working week. Children born within twelve months of one another were put into a room together and expected to learn broadly the same things at broadly the same speed. Sitting still became associated with paying attention. Looking someone in the eye became associated with listening. A particular kind of sociability became associated with being good with people. Being at your desk became associated with being productive.

None of those things are actually laws of human nature. They’re systems we invented.

And here’s where it gets really interesting.

Go further back and human communities had different needs. Agriculture, exploration, craftsmanship, engineering, trade and simply staying alive benefited from people bringing different things to the table. Some people noticed patterns others missed. Some could build things. Some were deeply curious. Some could spend days obsessively solving one problem. Some wandered off to see what was over the next hill. Some remembered everything. Some connected people. Some connected ideas. Some took risks that everyone else thought were completely ridiculous until they worked.

Difference wasn’t necessarily something to eliminate. Quite often, difference was useful.

That doesn’t mean history was some wonderful neurodivergent paradise. Of course it wasn’t. Humans have been spectacularly good at being horrible to people who are different throughout history as well. But the organisation of life and work was different, and in many cases, there was considerably more room for different rhythms of contribution than the industrial systems that followed.

Then we did something wonderfully ironic.

The industrial revolution itself was created by people doing precisely the sort of things that don’t fit particularly neatly into conformity.

The steam engine didn’t appear because James Watt/Thomas Savery/Thomas Newcomen was particularly good at following an existing steam engine procedure. The great inventors, engineers, experimenters, and entrepreneurs who dragged the world into industrialisation connected ideas, obsessed over problems, built things that didn’t exist, broke things, got things wrong, and eventually made something extraordinary work.

We obviously can’t diagnose these people retrospectively, nor do we need to. That’s not the point.

The point is that the industrial age was created through exactly the sort of divergent human capability that eventually helped create a world increasingly obsessed with conformity, standardisation, schedules and repeatability.

And now the machine is changing again.

The digital age, and particularly artificial intelligence, is steadily eating away at the value of routine and repeatable cognitive work. If a job is fundamentally “take this predictable input, follow this process and produce this predictable output”, machines are becoming extraordinarily good at it.

Which means the things becoming more valuable are the things that are harder to make predictable. Value moves over time.

Creativity, judgement, curiosity, relationships, leadership, pattern recognition, connecting completely unrelated ideas, challenging assumptions, sitting with ambiguity, seeing something everybody else walked past and occasionally asking the wonderfully annoying question, “Why the hell do we do it that way?”

Those qualities aren’t new. Human beings have always had them.

The environment has changed around them.

And that starts to explain why we’re suddenly seeing so many people who were previously hiding in plain sight.

We’re not creating more neuro-complex people. We’re getting better at recognising them.

We’re diagnosing people we missed. Adults are discovering explanations for things they’ve spent forty or fifty years simply assuming were personal failings or eccentricities. Parents go through an assessment process with their child and suddenly see themselves as though looking in a mirror. Women and girls who didn’t resemble the old stereotypes are being identified. Successful people who never entered a diagnostic system because they found ways of building lives around themselves are discovering there was actually a reason they experienced the world differently.

And then there will be another group who never seek diagnosis at all, because they don’t need one. They have built an environment that works, found people who work with them, found the work that makes sense to their brain, or simply spent a lifetime being considered a little weird. Solopreneurs?

That’s the part that interests me in the numbers and thinking about them differently.

Our historical numbers are necessarily built around the people we could see, count, diagnose or otherwise identify. If an enormous number of people never needed a clinical system, never presented the way we expected, or simply learned to hide themselves well enough to get on with life, then our historical numbers won’t necessarily describe the whole population.

That still doesn’t mean everyone is neurodivergent.

It means we may have been counting the wrong people.

And this brings us to disability, because this is another part of the conversation where we tie ourselves in knots.

Yes, being neurodivergent can be disabling. We have to accept that, and disabled isn’t a bad word. We can’t simultaneously say that we support disabled people in all their forms while treating the possibility of being considered disabled ourselves as something terrible.

At the same time, neurodivergence and disability aren’t interchangeable measurements.

Some neurodivergent people are profoundly disabled and will remain profoundly disabled regardless of how wonderfully we redesign society. They need support, and pretending otherwise does them absolutely no favours.

For other people, a substantial amount of their disablement comes from continually colliding with an environment designed around somebody else’s way of functioning. The research around disability has been telling us this for a long time. The person and the environment interact. Change the environment and some of the disablement changes with it.

That doesn’t make the neurology disappear.

It changes the collision.

And that is where I reckon we have been thinking about inclusion far too narrowly.

Imagine a society and culture that wasn’t constantly talking about including people who are different into systems that weren’t designed for them in the first place. Imagine instead that we simply accepted that different people socialise differently, communicate differently, work differently, concentrate differently and contribute differently, and there is nothing particularly remarkable about that.

Imagine measuring productivity by what somebody actually contributes rather than how long their backside occupied a chair. Imagine accepting that somebody can be an extraordinary contributor without wanting to come to Friday afternoon drinks. Imagine schools where learning didn’t automatically require thirty children of roughly the same age to learn the same thing in the same way at the same time. Imagine businesses designed with enough flexibility that the person who needs something different isn’t required to disclose a diagnosis, fill out a form and ask permission simply to work in the way that makes them effective.

At that point, what happens to disability?

It doesn’t disappear. That’s important.

But for an awful lot of neuro-complex people, the disabling impact becomes considerably smaller because we’ve stopped manufacturing some of it unnecessarily.

And perhaps something else happens as well.

If being different doesn’t automatically mean being pushed towards a deficit model, perhaps more of the people currently hiding in plain sight become willing to explore themselves. At the moment we have this peculiar contradiction where we’re increasingly accepting of disability in other people while many people remain terrified of discovering that the word might apply to them. That makes people reluctant to look too closely at why they’ve always experienced the world differently, particularly if they’ve otherwise built a successful life.

There is an enormous difference between discovering something that explains you and being told that something is wrong with you.

That’s where neuro-complexity becomes useful to me as an idea. It gives us room to talk about the underlying variation without pretending that everybody experiencing it has the same disability, the same strengths, the same needs or even needs anything from anybody at all.

So no, I’m not suggesting everyone is neurodivergent.

I’m suggesting that there may be considerably more neurological diversity hiding in plain sight than the systems we built to count it have ever been capable of seeing.

And if the 40 to 50 percent hypothesis ultimately turns out to be too high, too low or completely wrong, the more important question survives it anyway.

What happens when we stop designing the world around an assumed normal person and then adding accommodations for everybody who doesn’t fit?

There is more room for different kinds of people than ever before, and the world we’re building will need those differences.

Maybe inclusion isn’t really the destination.

Maybe the better destination is designing a world broad enough that most people don’t need to ask to be included in the first place.

If We Have to Call It Inclusive, Is It Really Inclusive?

Someone left an interesting comment on my last article, and it sent me down another rabbit hole. They made the

What If We’ve Been Doing Workplace Inclusion Backwards?

What If Naturally Inclusive Was Just… Normal? We’ve been going down quite a rabbit hole over these past few articles.